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There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Personal
Wisdom
Relying
Knowing
Shortcuts
Knowledge
Gained
Experience
Conventional
Nothing
Following
Worse
Especially

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
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The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
Ben Horowitz
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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'
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I think theres a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Ben Horowitz
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To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
Ben Horowitz
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Ben Horowitz
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In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
Ben Horowitz
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
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As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.
Ben Horowitz
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Don't punk out and don't quit.
Ben Horowitz
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Ben Horowitz
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For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.
Ben Horowitz
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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
Ben Horowitz
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The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.
Ben Horowitz
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I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
Ben Horowitz
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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz